The New Enemy (Liam Scott #3) Author: Andy McNab Genre: Military Fiction Released: 2015 Rating: ★★☆☆☆ It's a deadly game of hide and seek. Liam Scott has joined Recce Platoon. And it looks like he will be heading for Somalia. His mission is to gather intelligence from behind enemy lines, carrying out top-secret surveillance and dead letter drops. But he's new to the game and there's a lot to learn. Soon Liam is monitoring a den of Al-Shabaab militants and hunting a key terrorist t...

0.0 Context setting Monday 21 September in Portland, Oregon, where it’s still unseasonably warm. I am also tired. Are you tired? It’s just tiring all over. I am also sore because I am 46 years old and yesterday went roller skating for the second time ever for at a kid birthday party. 0.1 How People Work, Live! Last Friday I had Anna Pickard on which was lovely because she’s the third person I’ve had on with an English accent. We got to talk about words and writing and how to sell ...

You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined in every generation through sex and gained the occasional mutation, on the whole the genome has been stable and has been passed down reliably from your ancestors. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome is a wild drama: mobile, repetitive, disruptive, even viral. Source You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined ...

Here’s some Rust code: // define a function fn foo (x : i32 , y : i32 ) -> i32 { // body elided } // call it let z = foo ( 5 , 6 ); In programming language jargon, we call x and y parameters and 5 and 6 arguments . Rust does not have many fancy features related to parameters and arguments. But other languages do. For example, here’s a function in Ruby , another language I’ve written a ton of: # its definition in Rails def redirect_to (option...

Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev , their first example of a new category of model that they are calling "System One models" (I'm with Maggie Appleton, I think "decision models" is a better name for these). Jev is an interesting variant on the usual LLM format: it still accepts text inputs, but instead of text output it returns floating point numbers corresponding to categories, yes/no questions, ratings, and associated confidence scores. TypeSafe describe Jev like this: Think of Jev...

The following conversation is fictional. --------------------------- ALICE: (Looking over a student's record.) Hmm, let's see. She wants to work in quantum computing. She's had the year-long quantum sequence in the physics department and has taken a course in quantum computing in the computer science department. She has done a project in quantum computing in an REU program.  Grades good, letters good. I think we should admit her. BOB: Wait! Did she get a minor in Physics? This is very important...

The past year has been exciting for w64devkit, which like any software distribution is never complete. Peter0x44 joined as co-maintainer, and has pushed the project in good, new directions, with ideas I would never have considered. Many of his improvements have gone back upstream, and so you may benefit even if you don’t use w64devkit. I’d like to touch on the various odds and ends from the past year. Release security In April I announced that release packaging is now signed . Today...

I’m talking in the context of industrial programming . A few statements I believe to be true: If you aren’t doing it hands-on, your opinion about it is very likely to be completely wrong . Being influential doesn’t automatically make you right. Talking about coding and delivering software under real constraints are two very different things. Before clicking on a programming video, it doesn’t hurt to check the creator’s credentials. Yet we keep listening to influential p...

New Zealand is still expanding and refining its 5G networks, yet researchers around the world are already working on what comes next. 6G is a serious effort to rethink how devices, people, and machines stay connected. For a country spread across islands, with remote rural communities as well as busy urban centres, the prospect of faster, smarter, and more reliable connections carries real weight. Understanding what 6G could offer also helps separate realistic developments from the mo...

Well hello there! The levity with which I’ve introduced this post, and the delighted manner in which I’m currently writing it (sitting next to a computer that has recently been re-transplanted back into its original case) both may seem to run counter to the topic at hand. Namely, that as a retrocomputer tragic, I’ve had to forfeit my dream of having a beige NAS case in favour of something more practical for what we need. But I have a far better solution now, and am relieved to have recogni...

Millions of Large-Language-Model -generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development . We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves). I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize tooling improvements from software companies at the bleeding e...

Lately I've been playing classic World of Warcraft to get a feel for it and see if I like it before I try and go head-first into WoW Forever fairly blind with some friends. People have told me that World of Warcraft is good, but I haven't personally played it (or really any MMO outside of Final Fantasy 14). I've wanted to see for myself, so I dug in. I've been leveling an undead warlock and recently I've gotten my way to The Barrens. My goal was to kill some planestriders and collect...

Joint Indo-US discovery of water and hydroxyl across the Moon’s surface by the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, prominently highlighted as blue and violet on this reflected infrared radiation map. Individual images: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Brown University / ISRO / TeamIndus | Graphic: Jatan Mehta 17 years ago this week, a paper published in Science announced the discovery of water on the Moon by India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter. Changing the notion of a bone-dry Moon as cemented during the Apoll...

Back in June, I gave a keynote at the “Identiverse” conference about app and website authentication with a focus on passkeys. The talk touched on values, useful developments and tips for websites and apps, and an interesting story about open, standards-based collaboration. It borrows some from my earlier talk at FIDO’s Authenticate conference, but it’s tighter and more fun. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to, give it a watch! YouTube Link Back in June, I gave a keynote...

Last winter I wrote a discrete event simulation framework in Python to keep myself busy, have something to put on my CV, experiment with LLM-assisted coding, and learn how async and await actually work. Over the summer, for similar reasons, I played around a bit with Lean and Gleam , thinking that I might translate the Software Design by Example books from JavaScript and Python into one or the other. Lean defeated me, and I quickly grew frustrated with the gaps in Gleam’s standa...

The following are my notes on discrete-time Fourier series (DTFS), as well as the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT). These topics serve as an important theoretical underpinning to the digital processing of signals by computers using the DFT (which will be covered in a future post). For discrete-time signals, we use the square bracket notation to denote samples: x[n] is the n-th sample of signal x . We’ll say that a discrete-time (just discrete from this point on, for brevity) sig...

I maintain and comaintain several open-source libraries. Some of them are widely used: ada parses URLs in Node.js, fast_float parses numbers in GCC’s standard library and in Chromium, simdjson parses JSON in Node.js, simdutf validates and transcodes Unicode in Node.js, and the Roaring bitmap libraries sit inside many database engines. These libraries are mature. They have been optimized for years, by me and by others. For a long time, their performance was flat. Not because nobody cared, but...

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips , sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s . Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a...

Solitaire Alone Together I made a new game. It's called Solitaire Alone Together . It's Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/solitaire-alone-together Solitaire Alone Together I made a new game. It's called Solitaire Alone Together . It's Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet. Read the full post on my blog! H...

The twentieth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 20, I chat with Sara , the author of sarajoy.dev and whimsica11y.net , among other things, the importance of web accessibility, screen readers, and the joy of exploring and making things on the web. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Sara sarajoy.dev The twentieth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out ...

Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters t...

Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at AirBnB’s housing accelerator, rising steel prices, a resurgence of US coal power, low-head dams, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities Halina Bennet on what she’s learned from a year of covering housi...

“System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958 , but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a classifier to identify images of dogs, it can’t be used to tell you if a streetlight is red, or if a letter is urgent. Like a LLM, Jev can be prompted for a wide variety of tasks, from sorting email to playing Doom . I think models like this are going to be important. There are many tasks that a LLM could do in theory but ...